Having a bicycle gives you a lot of freedom to travel. But, when loaded with all your worldly possessions for the next two and a half months, it is also a bit of a liability should you want to pop into an interesting looking museum or shop. So yesterday, rather than properly exploring the town, I whiled away some of the spare hours cycling the St Malo promenade and then taking a coffee with a view. A two mile long, wide sandy beach stretched before me as I watched the waves roll in and kite surfers and walkers make the most of blue sky and sea breezes. Later, two train changes saw me to St Nazaire, my hotel - conveniently close to the station - and a quiet night of recovery.
St Nazaire sits on the mouth of the Loire on the Atlantic coast of France and for a port town it has a neat, clean and peaceful feel about it. My knowledge of its history is limited to two things, both related to the Second World War: it was the location of massive concrete German U Boat pens from where crews set out to sink trans-Atlantic merchant shipping supplying Britain; and it had an important dry dock that a daring Commando raid put out of action early in the war (this I know courtesy of Trevor Howard and Richard Attenborough in the 1958 movie The Gift Horse which I watched as a kid).
I have given myself an extra night here to allow time to explore the town so this morning I set out on foot under a grey sky to check out the history I knew about and discover some I did not. First it was to the sea front and those submarine pens. A colossal structure of reinforced concrete, it dominates the harbour even today. The pens open out into a basin and opposite a lock leads to the Loire estuary and the open sea - another construction completely enveloped in concrete to provide protection from allied bombing. Today the pen's cavernous interiors provide a location for museums, tourist information and the occasional car to park.
I wandered the harbour area, saw a clever piece of modern art that needed to be viewed from exactly the right spot, visited the local museum and the monument to the Commandos of that 1942 raid, stocked up on supplies and found the remnants of a prehistoric burial chamber in the town centre (reconstructed I’m sure) before heading back to plan tomorrow - the actual start of my trip - and the next couple of days.
It looks like I will be getting wet.
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